STEPHEN TRIMBLE / WASHINGTON DC
The USAF aims to improve battlespace management with the advent of the E-10A multi-sensor command and control aircraft
The final shape of a controversial leap in battle management technology for the US Air Force is coming together. Nine months after the first solicitation for the onboard battle management command and control (BMC2) suite on Northrop Grumman E-10A's multi-sensor command and control aircraft (MC2A) was issued, three contractor teams led by Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman are expected to make final offers by the end of April. A $400 million development contract could be awarded by the end of the second quarter.
The goal is to design a system to tackle two of the USAF's shortcomings in modern war - the ability to find, fix, track and engage unscheduled and often fleeting targets of opportunity, and, more importantly, to manage the time-critical process of detecting and destroying cruise missiles.
The war in Iraq showed the USAF has made progress in this area, but only by patching together existing networks that were not designed to be linked directly to other battlefield platforms, USAF Chief of Staff Gen John Jumper says.
Linking platforms
"Crew put together the information they needed to make sure that the [BoeingRC-135] Rivet Joint that picked up the cue was passing it off to the [Northrop Grumman E-8] JSTARS and the JSTARS was getting to the [Northrop Grumman RQ-4A] Global Hawk, which got the precise co-ordinates to the bombers," Jumper says. "They were doing that in a way that got the job done, but not in the way that we need to do it. We saw that value and learned from it."
BMC2 is among four significant procurement actions in the E-10A programme, which, unlike other air force aircraft projects, does not have a single, integrated budget line. Boeing has been awarded $126 million to provide the first 767-400ER testbed platform. The $215 million task of integrating the platform, the radar and the BMC2 suite has been awarded to a Northrop Grumman-led team that includes Boeing and Raytheon.
The primary aim of the E-10A is to provide detection and tracking of enemy cruise missiles, particularly the low-flying stealthy weapons that air force officials fear are spreading to rogue states. For this, the aircraft uses the Northrop Grumman/Raytheon Multi-Platform Radar Technology Insertion Program (MP-RTIP) active-array radar, which has a strong airborne ground surveillance capability. The MP-RTIP sensor is to improve resolution to better than 0.3m (1ft), a giant leap compared to the JSTARS resolution of 3.6-4.3m. The radar's range is expected to greatly exceed the roughly 320km (175nm) limit of the current system.
Since its inception, the air force has wanted to link the sensor to an onboard battle management system. Crew could then analyse the data and instantly feed target co-ordinates to nearby strike assets. The onboard system would be fully interoperable with other intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) platforms, such as the Global Hawk, General Atomics Predator, JSTARS, Lockheed Martin EP-3 and Northrop Grumman E-2C Hawkeye.
Critics have complained that the air force already has such a system on the ground - the roughly 800-person air operations centre (AOC). Even if one is not available in theatre, forthcoming bandwidth expansion efforts promise to supply enough communicating power to control battles directly from the Pentagon or other bases on US soil.
Hitting targets
To its supporters, the BMC2 suite is not just a mini-AOC that happens to be airborne. It would dramatically improve the US military's chances of striking the time-critical targets that have vexed operations planners since Operation Desert Storm. Unattached from the AOC's responsibility to manage the air tasking order, a daily list of planned mission assignments, the onboard C2 crew members would be focused solely on attacking "pop-up" targets, especially in time-critical situations such as cruise missile attacks. Finally, BMC2 would directly link battlefield commanders to products from multiple ISR systems without needing to route data via the USA through potentially vulnerable satellite communications, which commanders worry are also limited by latency.
"The number of links between nodes that are participating in that cycle will extend your timeline," says one industry official. The more dependencies you have on off-board communications, the more reliances you have on communications, the greater risk you have."
So far, the MC2A concept has survived attempts by Congress and Pentagon insiders to re-examine or even abandon it. In 2002, the air force needed to rescue MC2A from lawmakers. There was an attempt in Congress to transfer the concept from the 767 to an active Boeing 707-based testbed called the Paul Revere. Air force programme officials later acknowledged they had confused the issue by labelling the Paul Revere the MC2A-X, despite the fact that the platform was not capable of hosting the MP-RTIP sensor and the BMC2 suite. The air force was able to restore the programme's planned funding level several months later using a Congressional add-on to the fiscal year 2003 budget.
A year later, critics in the Office of Secretary of Defense again challenged the air force to justify the programme, which has a $5.3 billion price tag to provide the first five operational aircraft by about 2013. The renewed deliberations prompted Michael Wynne, the Pentagon's acquisition chief, to order the air force to postpone development of the E-10A testbed by a year, to start in June 2005, but he allowed the programme to continue developing the MP-RTIP and BMC2 suite in the meantime. Wynne expressed his strong support for the future of a platform-independent airborne ground-surveillance radar system.
Since then, the air force has adapted its strategy to amplify the E-10A's role in countering cruise missiles, for which the US military has no other similar airborne capability. By contrast, a lesser, but effective, version of the ground moving-target indicator (GMTI) capability is already provided by the JSTARS fleet, and the planned Space Based Radar would provide an equivalent surveillance capability, with the added advantage of a persistent presence almost anywhere.
Given that backdrop, it was perhaps not surprising that air force secretary James Roche sounded defensive about the MC2A concept as he addressed the Air Force Association last month in Orlando. Saying he would "try to dispel some of the mythology which seems to have grown up about the term MC2A", Roche gave a carefully worded description of the programme.
"MC2A always has been thought of as an integration and battle management command and control system. It is sensor independent. It is platform independent," he said. "Meanwhile, there's a thing called MP-RTIP, which will give us a far better GMTI and SAR [synthetic aperture radar]-capable radarÉEarly on in its development it was noted that if we could expand the height of MP-RTIP, or [its] aperture, from roughly 2ft to 4ft, we could make a major contribution to cruise missile defence as well.
"But a 4ft gondola, or canoe, can only fit on a widebodied aircraft. Put MP-RTIP with a 4ft aperture on a widebodied aircraft and there's lots of room for the MC2A joint battle management integration module. Thus the E-10A."
Refining BMC2
The scope of the BMC2 function has undergone a transformation as air force buyers refine their budget estimates and industry hones the finer points of their proposals. Perhaps the most notable change has been the plunging estimates for how many crew members are required for the job of manning the BMC2 workstations.
Early last year, industry teams vying for the award talked about crews of between 50 and 60. Three months later, when the second phase of the contest began, industry officials talked about a crew of 30 to 50. By February, retired USAF Gen Michael Short, now a Northrop Grumman consultant, described a BMC2 suite staffed by 16-20.
Affordable capability
The dwindling numbers imply a shift in thinking about the capabilities of automated decision-making tools and data-fusion software. It is also a reflection of the air force's growing unease about how many capabilities the service is willing to pay for - at least initially. For example, air force officials delayed the release of the first BMC2 request for proposals by two weeks while they scaled back the system's technical requirements to a level they believed they could afford. The air force is also inviting the contractors to use their proposals to show how much of the original capability can be reinserted into the early spirals of the programme, but at the lower price level.
BMC2 has been loosely described as anything behind the E-10A's flightdeck door except for the sensor. It includes all the non-radar and non-aircraft subsystems, such as the software architecture, data exploitation and communications and datalinks.
Onboard communications would include the Multiplatform Common Datalink, Link 16 Joint Tactical Information Distribution System, satellite communications for beyond line-of-sight, and a variety of low-band UHF and VHF radios.
Baseline requirements have been shuffled to reflect funding shortages and the shift towards a greater emphasis on the cruise missile defence role. Shortly after lessons started pouring in from the war in Iraq, the air force added a friendly force tracking capability to the list of BMC2 requirements.
An early requirements document called on BMC2 to offer a system that automatically assigns available weapons to time-critical strike missions, reducing the need for onboard man-in-the-loop decision-making. But the air force decided to reclassify it to a "objective" requirement, meaning the service would attempt to reinsert it during later spirals, or perhaps allow the contractors to propose a way of affordably including it in the earliest version of the system. The air force was not convinced that the current state of data-fusion technology was either affordable or reliable enough to be included as a baseline objective.
Other technologies that have also been deferred to later spirals include automatic functions that can analyse the rules of engagement to recommend courses of action in specific mission situations, and automatic battle damage assessment.
One remaining requirement calls for an easily readable map screen that can interpret various forms of intelligence data gathered from offboard platforms.
In June last year, Northrop Grumman vice-president for air force surveillance programmes Christopher Hernandez said that the system would be modular enough to be assigned a specific role on the battlefield.
"One day you could be focused purely on Scud hunts, for instance," says Hernandez. "Or another day you could be looking at a certain area within the battlespace for a particular activity. So you can tailor the aircraft on the fly on a mission-by-mission basis."
Five E-10As are expected to augment and eventually replace GMTI capability now provided by the JSTARS. Proposals for an E-10B and E-10C, respectively, may serve as the follow-on templates for replacing the Boeing E-3 Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) and the Rivet Joint electronic-warfare platform.
"Put a new AMTI [airborne moving target indicator] radar with the MC2A and you have the E-10B, the potential follow-on to AWACS. Rivet Joint and MC2A yields the E-10C," air force secretary Roche told the Air Warfare Symposium in February. "All variants will provide sensor fusion, UAV [unmanned air vehicle] and RPA [remotely piloted aircraft] control, and battlefield situational awareness, among other things. An E-10 series, each of which would share a common integration and battle management command and control suite, the MC2A."
Original plans for the E-10A called for combining the GMTI and AMTI functions on the same aircraft. But concerns arose about electromagnetic interference problems, and there were reports that the AMTI sensor consumes 90% of the power capacity on Japan's 767 AWACS. In the end, the huge cost of loading a 767-400ER with two onboard radars and a BMC2 suite probably played a role in the air force's decision to split the fleet into a series of aircraft.
A contract award is due in April after a 30-day delay for the air force to adjust the programme's baseline requirements to the singular focus on cruise missile defence.
The three contractor teams competing for the roughly $500 million contract to design and develop the E-10A BMC2 suite have spent nearly nine months refining their proposals. Boeing says its BMC2 team includes BAE Systems, Alphatech, Booz Allen Hamilton, CollaborX, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman. Lockheed Martin is teamed with Raytheon and Science Applications International for its BMC2 bid, and other partners include Alphatech, Concurrent Technologies, L-3 Communications and Zel Technologies.
Northrop Grumman is leading a team that includes five of its own units, plus Alphatech, Cisco Systems, Harris, General Dynamics, L-3, L-3's ComCept and ZelTech.
Alphatech connection
Alphatech is the one partner common to all three teams. The Massachusetts-based company is considered a leader in automatic target recognition systems that lie at the core of BMC2's forward-based ground surveillance capability. Part of that job includes detecting low-flying stealthly cruise missiles amidst heavy air and ground clutter.
Two of the teams signed up Hampton, Virginia-based ZelTech, which is the prime contractor for the air force's time-critical targeting functionality system.
The contractor teams began developing their proposals after the air force opened the competition in June 2003. Three months later, the air force awarded $4 million contracts to each of the three teams to further refine their proposals. Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin have run highly publicised exercises in specially designed simulation centres to test several elements of their proposals, including some tests using the Scaled Composites Proteus high-altitude UAV as a stand-in for the RQ-4A Global Hawk. The air force programme office has presented a baseline operational scenario and asked the teams to submit proposals that show how each product performs.
Source: Flight International
